If that was the case, I'd be fashion blind.
Maybe blind goes a little too far. It's not like I could look at this young woman and think to myself, "What a perfectly normal, decent-looking outfit."
I'm not blind blind. But even in the actual non-fashion sense, blindness is a scale. On the one side you have people who can't see anything - no light, no color, nothing - and further down the scale you have people who can technically see a little, but not enough that you'd want them to drive. If I needed the ability to sense good fashion choices to drive, I'd be shit out of luck.
For example, this young lady:
So what's wrong with this outfit?
I'd say:
- I hate the big clunky heels; I feel like they're hideous.
- Are those boy shorts? (But isn't wearing men's clothing a thing? So maybe that's not actually a problem?)
- T-shirts are too...t-shirty?
- This outfit seems very casual. (But don't you need casual outfits sometimes? Not sure how that's a fashion no-no.)
- ....
I can see that there's something wrong, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is, let alone how to fix it. If I were told to fix this woman's outfit, I'd likely have her sell her purse and go buy something nicer. What something? Hell if I know.
Hello. My name is Erin Grace. And I am a style noob.
It feels kind of pathetic, being almost 30 and still needing something to "drive" all my fashion choices. (I have literally never gone shopping myself and come back with good results.) And even when I have someone else drive for me, when I come home and wear the clothes we bought I usually look in the mirror and think, "There's something wrong." But like always, I can't put my finger on it, and I wind up wearing clothes all day that just feel ugly somehow, without any way to fix it.
But there's hope! It turns out that I might be on the road to recovery!
I've been studying - yes, studying - the way that fashion is put together, and I've been coming up with some rules. Obviously these aren't going to be interesting to people who already have a normal or above average fashion-sense; I'm finding that some of the rules I'm discovering have been repeated doggedly since I could remember hearing anything about fashion at all. The difference for me is that I've never understood the meaning of these rules until now. I'm going to write about these things as I discover them, and hopefully it'll help anyone else out there suffering from fashion-blindness.
